


how endlessly you fall

by tosca1390



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-29
Updated: 2010-09-29
Packaged: 2017-10-14 15:57:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/150973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tosca1390/pseuds/tosca1390
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"Something should be done."</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	how endlessly you fall

**Author's Note:**

> Wrriten for [](http://izzyfics.livejournal.com/profile)[**izzyfics**](http://izzyfics.livejournal.com/), who requested: **Jocelyn McCoy + ST AOS + A Fistful of Sky + Green**.

*

“Something should be done.”

“Not by me,” Jocelyn retorted sharply, as her mama sat at her (all hers, now) kitchen table, delicately sipping sweet tea. “He’s not my problem anymore.”

“Divorce is just legality, sweetheart,” her mama said easily, eyes blue as the summer sky. Condensation curled itself down the grooves of her glass, around her perfectly-shaped fingertips. “He’s stomping around town like a drunken loon.”

Jocelyn crossed her ankles (as any lady should when seated) and gave her mama a hard glare over the smooth oak table. “He didn’t put up a fight, it’s not my fault he doesn’t have anything left.”

Her mama merely raised a brow and sipped silently. The green of her sundress deepened against the wood and the warm spring sun streaming in through the wide bay windows.

Breathing out, Jocelyn looked away, across the wide expanse of a house that used to be for two, and now was just hers, all hers, just as half the money was, and all their old friends (not that Leonard really made friends all that well in the first place), and the verdant yard stretching out in all directions.

The house was too big for just one. But she’d earned it, her own fistful of whatever she could get from the wreckage that had been her marriage.

“He ought to leave and start over somewhere new,” her mama said after a long spell of quiet (the house was too quiet, without the arguing and Leonard’s grumblings).

“This is his home, Mama,” Jocelyn said wearily, reaching for a shortbread cookie. “He doesn’t have to leave.”

“Well, it’s not as if he has anyone left here, since his father passed, bless his soul,” her mama murmured, crossing herself.

Something sickly pierced Jocelyn then, an ache she hadn’t felt since the last time she’d seen Leonard, when they signed the papers. “He may not want to leave the place where his father is buried,” she said quietly after a moment, thinking of that good-natured, grumbling man that had been David McCoy, before—

“It’s just not healthy, and I believe you’re the only one he’d listen to, Jocelyn,” her mama was saying, pouring herself another glass of tea.

Jocelyn snorted then. “I doubt that very much, Mama.”

*

It was only after the priest’s wife, the chairman of the hospital (and his partner), and even the local bartenders stopped her in the street to gently speak to her of her ex-husband that she decided enough was enough. She was divorced from him, and this was not her responsibility any longer, and it needed to end.

On a too-warm day in late April, Leonard opened the solid oaken front door to his late father’s farmhouse and merely stared at her through the screen door, brow thick with lines.

Jocelyn cleared her throat, grasping her purse just a little tighter. “Hello, Leonard.”

He didn’t say a word, and she rolled her eyes. “Don’t be a heathen, let me in.”

“What, you want this house too?” he all but growled, anger radiating off every part of him.

She cocked her stance, planting a hand on her hip. “I will speak my peace, and I will do it on the front porch in from of the neighbors if I must, so help me—“

“Do it then, what the hell do I care?” he snapped.

Gritting her teeth, she smoothed her hair back from her shoulders. “Leonard, I think you ought to leave town.”

His face went slack, and then his eyebrows turned down into that all-too-familiar V, ripe with anger and irritation. “Well this ought to be wonderful,” he groused, almost stomping through the screen door to walk onto the porch.

She straightened instinctively, meeting his eyes. “You’re a mess,” she said bluntly.

“Whose fault is that?” he muttered.

“Your own,” she shot back.

He raked a hand through his mussed hair, looking green-grey around the edges and smelling of antiseptic and bourbon. The sunlight caught in his eyes, making them greener than she’d remembered. “Yeah. You’re right about that,” he said gruffly after a moment.

Shifting on her heels, she smoothed down the creases in her skirt, wishing for any sort of breeze. “You don’t have anything left here anymore, Leonard,” she said finally, striving for gentleness. “And you’re only making yourself miserable.”

“My life is miserable, Joce,” he retorted, but lacking heat.

She tilted her chin up, shrugging. “Maybe it doesn’t have to be.”

He looked at her hard for a moment. “Your mama’s been spying on me,” he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck.

She glanced up at the sky, at the wide blue, and sighed. “Everyone’s been talking. And even though we are divorced, they think I have some power over you,” she said tiredly.

“You did, once,” he said quietly, achingly, and she couldn’t look at him again, not for a long moment.

“You’re torturing yourself, and me, and the rest of our town,” she said softly.

He scoffed, a deep grunt in the back of his throat she used to find endearing. “Can’t everyone else move?”

She met his gaze, shaking her head. “No.”

He watched her for a long moment, eyes hard and assessing; she pursed her lips, stiffening under his gaze. “You won’t be happy until you take the whole world away from me, will you?” he asked bitterly, pain and betrayal and raw anger radiating off of him like mid-July heat.

An urge to argue struck her, but she pushed it back and down. She didn’t argue with him any longer, didn’t waste her breath on it; she never won, anyway.

Except for now.

“If that’s what it takes to get my life back,” she said finally, sharply.

He stepped back, almost as if wounded; she clutched her purse tightly, her knuckles white. Birds sang in the magnolia trees around them; it felt as if the sky was pressing in, closing them in, and she had to struggle to breathe.

After a long, terrible moment, he turned back towards the screen door, shoulders slumped. “Goodbye, Jocelyn.”

She opened her mouth to say farewell, but the front door slammed before the words left her throat.

*

A week later, he was gone.

Jocelyn began to breathe again.

*  



End file.
